Torture with Consequences

When George W. Bush finished his second term in January 2009, several commentators in the U.S. media came to the conclusion that the nation had never had a worse president.

The name George W. Bush was connected with two disastrous wars, as well as a list of other problems with which his successor Barack Obama continues to deal today. That includes everything related to the name Guantanamo, a synonym for the systematic violation of basic democratic principles, such as the lengthy imprisonment and abuse, all without benefit of court trial and legal representation, of hundreds of individuals suspected of being Islamic terrorists swept up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

An off-shoot of the Guantanamo system was also introduced by secret CIA teams, whereby such suspects were flown to other nations where they were interrogated and tortured. Fifty-four governments are said to have been complicit in this practice, among them not only rogue regimes like Syria, but also European Union members Poland, Lithuania and Romania.

The governments of those three nations deny, obfuscate or refuse to comment, but what else can these U.S. allies do? They are under enormous pressure, especially now in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to seek the support of the United States, which doesn’t want to be publicly pilloried and prefers to just ignore the subject.

Warsaw Can’t Deny It Aided and Abetted the U.S.

That, of course, cannot be reconciled with the rule of law in a constitutional democracy, something the United States and the European Union both claim to be. So it came as no surprise that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found Poland guilty of participating in the illegal imprisonment and torture of two Arabs in 2002 and ordered it to pay damages.

The two Arab suspects were both taken to the secluded Masurian lake district of Poland. Then-head of the social democratic government Leszek Miller doesn’t deny cooperation with the CIA but denies any knowledge of torture. The results of criminal investigations were apparently hidden for years.

The whole affair is, as Poland’s President Bronislaw Komoroski rightly observed, shameful in the highest degree and shows what a bind Warsaw finds itself in. The scandal touches on the innermost core of Polish self-image, namely, the democratic and liberal traditions of a nation that fought for eight generations to establish rule of law principles that were eradicated in 2002 and 2003 by its main ally George W. Bush, as well as with the help of some of his own countrymen.

Now Obama needs to take the court’s decision to heart. He cannot permit the least bit of doubt as to who represents the rule of law and who doesn’t, especially in his disagreements with Russian President Putin.